Posts Tagged ‘Dr Martin Luther King’

Off course you couldn’t get away from the Royal Wedding today. As a typical Brit I am usually embarrassed at displays of flag waving and patriotism but I found myself wearing my England t-shirt to work in New York and watching the ceremony while eating breakfast.

I can remember Princess Diana’s wedding while I was a teenager and in my full flush of enthusiasm for the monarchy. During my twenties I flirted with republicanism but I have now swung back to thinking it is a good idea to have a symbolic non-political head of state.

It cuts down the ego of the Prime Minister to have an audience with the monarch every week and days like today put British politicians firmly in their place. They can see they are very unlikely to regarded with the same affection and are reminded that the monarchy will be there long after they have left the stage. Some Americans even feel the same way :

If it’s an affront to democratic sensibilities, it’s also a safeguard for democratic institutions. Better a real king, crowned and powerless, than the many pseudo-kings who have strutted (and still strut) so destructively across the modern stage. (The Dish)

A royal family sweetens politics by the seasonable addition of nice and pretty events. It introduces irrelevant facts into the business of government, but they are facts which speak to men’s bosoms and employ their thoughts. (The Spectator)

Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — “We want to be free.”

The funniest article I have read for a long time is Tour de Gall, AA Gill‘s review of Parisian restaurant L’Ami Louis in Vanity Fair.

This is his description of the dining room before he even gets going on the food :

It’s a long, dark corridor with luggage racks stretching the length of the room. It gives you the feeling of being in a second-class railway carriage in the Balkans. It’s painted a shiny, distressed dung brown. The cramped tables are set with labially pink cloths, which give it a colonic appeal and the awkward sense that you might be a suppository. In the middle of the room is a stubby stove that also looks vaguely proctological.

Martin Luther King, Jr was the only person I have ever observed or known – and I’ve never ever seen or heard anyone do it since – who could compose a speech extemporaneously in real time and while he was speaking. Like we use computer skills, he could cut and paste in his mind from previous speeches or writings and he could insert those excerpts into his real time speech. It was an extraordinary ability. It was a transcendental experience to be there. It was like watching lightning captured in a bottle.

I was amazed to learn that Dr King improvised the most memorable parts of the speech. He paused after reaching the seventh paragraph of his prepared remarks and at that point singer Mahalia Jackson, who was listening on stage, called out : ” Tell ’em about the ‘Dream’ Martin, tell ’em about the ‘Dream!'”

“And he improvised it all. He spoke of children of different races holding hands. He spoke of a great metaphoric leveling of the land and a straightening out of ‘crooked places,’ which of course has an amazing dual meaning that would take some writers a lifetime to come up with.

It was hypnotic. Each time Martin told us that he had a dream, the world was pulled one step closer inside it. I’ve never seen anything like it.

The crowd was rapt. I was charged with a feverish kind of love for my friend. By the time Martin quoted Samuel Francis Smith’s “America” I figured you could measure the tears of joy in the crowd by the gallon.”

Proof that the right person at the right time with the right words really can change history.